Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [84]
Still, I never harbored any real animosity toward the show or any of the people who were in positions of power while I was on it. I always knew that the key to my success lay within me. Coming up with an idea to pitch to the host was difficult. Coming up with an original character to launch my Saturday Night Live career was maddening. I didn’t want to have to wait my turn. I wasn’t happy having one line in someone else’s sketch. In hindsight, I was probably on the same path as everyone else who had ever been on the show. But eventually becoming a star wasn’t what I had signed up for.
I did know that the easiest way for stand-up comics who are on SNL to get on the air is to do a feature during Weekend Update. When your well of ideas has run dry and there isn’t an original character in your head, you could always write down some of your stand-up and submit it for Weekend Update. Chris Rock did this a lot, as did Spade when he started out. I was never comfortable with this process because I figured if my stand-up made Weekend Update, then I wouldn’t be able to use it anymore in the comedy clubs. It was hard enough to come up with sketches twenty weeks of the year, but when those twenty weeks were up, I didn’t want to have to write a new act as well.
I envisioned myself onstage someplace doing my routines with the audience staring blankly at me because they had already heard what I was telling them. So what I did was to devour all the newspapers I could get my hands on to find some current events items that I could write an Update piece on. Few of the pieces I wrote for Update were ever picked, but I was convinced that it had nothing to do with their humor content.
Sometimes I would write a Weekend Update piece that would get a lot of laughs at read-through or even rehearsal, but wouldn’t be selected for the show. One sketch I wrote was about a guy who talks about how tricky investing in the stock market is, so he turns to currency trading. He goes to the airport and puts down a hundred bucks and receives several million pesos. “Now, I can’t speak for everyone and I can’t guarantee this investment will pay off, but I walked out of the airport with a few million bones in my pocket,” he tells the audience. “I was on a hot streak until I put it all in German marks and lost half my money. So if you go to the airport, stick with the pesos.”
“Lance Currothers” was an Update piece that killed at dress rehearsal but was killed before the live show. The sketch featured me as an obviously gay movie critic who sang his reviews. To the tune of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire,” Lance sang: “Hey, little girl, is your daddy home? Or did he go and dress up like a woman from an old folks’ home. Hey…he’s a maid for hire. Go see Mrs. Doubtfire.” Lance would then score the movie on his Yaah-meter and let out a “yaahh.” Though no one ever gave me a definitive reason, I knew that Jim Downey didn’t like gay sketches, so I suspect his phobia did Lance in.
I had always thought that getting sketches on the air would be like playing baseball. If you’re playing well and knocking the ball out of the park, you play. That wasn’t the case for me. Some weeks I would write and act in the first sketch of the show. It would do great and I would think to myself, Great, now I’m on a roll! Then the wheels would just stop turning.
Often a sketch would be put on the air because certain performers in the sketch were light that week. Translation: They weren’t on last week’s show, and to pacify egos, the producers needed to put something with them in it on the air. How can the funniest sketches get on the air each week when the writers have that handicap? You stay up all night busting your ass and your sketch gets huge laughs at read-through, but the corkboard is loaded with sketches that are not as funny and are loaded with light cast members.
My second season on the show, I started to notice Lorne politicking a bit here and there. I would overhear him say things to Jim Downey like “Mike is light this week.” I always thought